Career Pathways: Fredie Unabia

Our Infectious Media ‘Career Pathways’ series of interviews aims to highlight working life, as well as the career options available to our staff. Here, Fredie Unabia, Technical Account Manager, in our London office, tells us about his journey at Infectious Media.

What did you do before you began working for Infectious Media?

Infectious Media was my first “proper” job after Uni, I had a couple of part-time and ad hoc roles as a student. I studied maths at Uni and wanted to use what I learned in a working environment.

One of my friends from the course already worked at Infectious Media and, after doing some research, this sparked my interest in digital media and programmatic. Even though I didn’t know exactly what programmatic was, I thought it was fascinating how online advertising could be made to be relevant to me!

Tell us about your Infectious Media career journey - where did it begin, and how did you make your way to Technical Account Manager?

I started at Infectious Media as an Optimisation Analyst for the Expedia account (this role doesn’t exist anymore since we merged the Optimisation and Accounts teams). The role at the time was managing campaigns which involved looking at their performance by analysing historical data. It was a great foundation in programmatic.

A year into the role, I was promoted to Senior Optimisation Analyst and moved on to the John Lewis account. This gave me more responsibility, the opportunity to mentor more junior members and improve working processes.

I had always had an interest in technology and with my experience with using the platform, a move to TechOps seemed like a natural transition. After speaking to my manager and when a position became available, I moved across to the TechOps team as a Technical Account Analyst. The role primarily consisted of troubleshooting problems with the platform such as delivery disruption of campaigns. My previous experience in Optimisation hugely helped with this and gave me a big head start.

After only four months, I was promoted to Technical Account Manager where I became more actively involved in working processes and began to assist my line manager, wherever I could, with technical integrations with our partners.

Overall, I’d say that my previous experience in Optimisation has been invaluable - the gift that keeps on giving.

You’ve worked here for two years, how has the business changed?

When I joined in 2016, Expedia was our biggest client as well as a large portion of our activity. Naturally, a lot of people across different teams were involved. This meant that, for a lot of people including myself, our skill set and experience was based on processes for this one client for some time. When our other clients developed further and we brought on new ones, many people were able to move on to these other accounts and gain valuable experience as well as apply what they learned from working on such a large account.

The demographic of the company has also changed significantly during my first few months since joining. I was hired during the beginning of a huge wave of recruitment and the majority of these new starters were of a similar age bracket as me. This added a lot of energy to the office atmosphere as well as the office culture which is always great.

Quick-fire Questions

Tea or coffee? Coffee (with too much sugar sometimes)

Linux or Windows? Linux

Who would play you in a film of your life? Onoe Matsuya, from “Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman”

Currently, our workflow is split between long term projects and ad hoc requests. The ad hoc tasks consist of troubleshooting bugs with our platform as well as investigating any disruptions to the delivery of our advertising campaigns. A lot of these would involve digging through databases and our platform code base which I absolutely enjoy.

The long term projects revolve around technical integrations with our partners as well as developing internal tools that facilitate day to day tasks across the company. Recently, I’ve been involved with our technical integration for out-of-home activity, helping the team Lead and the Product team to troubleshoot issues with the integration.

We also work on developing internal tools such as a profile debugger which facilitates a lot of our day to day ad hoc tasks and also serves as a first point of reference for the Activation team for any general troubleshooting.

What advice would you give to someone thinking about entering into a career in digital?

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. This was a huge mistake that I made when I first joined. Some people may think that others are going to think badly of you if you ask lots of questions but that’s how you learn. This especially applies to recent graduates, who have just spent a couple of years cramming content to get to an “end goal” where they know enough to pass exams.

This does not apply in a working environment and it took me a while to realise that. Digital media is constantly evolving, so there’s no “end goal” to cram for and everyone needs to constantly continue to learn. Be ready for a rapidly evolving marketplace, change happens all the time and very quickly.

Finally, what do you like best about working at Infectious Media?

When I joined the company, many people were also hired during the same period. This meant that my first impression of the company was a nice mix of long term employees who gave a friendly and casual atmosphere to the company culture, as well as new starters that I could relate to. After 2 years, this has remained mostly unchanged - I think the people here makes IM a great place to work in and I’m sure others would agree.